Reading Bottom’s Dream, John E. Woods’s new English translation of Arno Schmidt’s notoriously-untranslatable Zettel’s Traum, is like watching one of these beasts saunter out of the forest and begin munching on a telephone pole: the sheer, jurassic weirdness of the thing scrambles our pathways, making it difficult to do anything except stare. Part of this is simply a matter of size, for at 1,400 folio-sized pages Bottom’s Dream is both long and so physically cumbersome that it’s hard to imagine reading it on anything other than a lectern, or maybe a whale-elephant-turtle pagoda. Inside its cover, the idiosyncratically spelt and punctuated narrative scrolls downward in a trunk with marginal notes protruding like the ribs of a gigantic skeleton. The whole effect seems meant to repel, which is weird, since one of the first impressions we get upon reading Bottom’s Dream is of entering a puzzle or game, something designed to hold our attention. Foreboding in appearance, it responds to its audience as if it had been waiting for us … and then the more we read, the more the labyrinth opens, until soon we recognize it as less a minotaur’s trap than a kind of illustrated manuscript: a “booke” whose intricately embroidered letters are meant not just to be read, but to teach us how to read better.

It’s easy to see how it does so, for when it comes to technique, Bottom’s Dream keeps its gears on the surface. It’s like a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine, bristling with an inventiveness that veers past “smart” to a point between “zany” and “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”